SteveW

I have some doubt that the industry will move towards all downloads and royalties. There's too many old farts like me who want to physically own their media. I don't think too many people would go to paying royalties whenever they want to play a game, either. It reminds me of Circuit City's involvement with DIVX DVD players a few years back. You can buy a movie for five or six bucks, but you have to electronically pay each time you watch it. The players bombed because people want the option of using their media whenever and however many times they want without having to pay a bunch of greedy movie studio execs each time. A lot of game companies would love for us to pay monthly fees to play games, some that aren't even online at all (Phantasy Star Online for the Xbox requires you to pay for Xbox Live, even if you never play it online). I don't see downloads and royalties as being all that popular.

Today, I went to several thrifts near downtown Dallas, but came up empty at all of them (I almost bought a Commodore Plus/4 for $4.90, but didn't have any real use for it). My last stop was a gigantic Goodwill store in a really scary part of town, where I bought Dig Dug, Food Fight, and Ms. Pac-Man for the 7800, Galaxian, Phoenix, Mousetrap, Solaris, Midnight Magic, and The Empire Strikes Back for the 2600, and a boxed Alex Kidd in Miracle World for the SMS. They were all 59¢ each.

I loved Gyruss on my brother-in-law's C64 back in the day. Great music score, and addictive gameplay.

It makes sense that Tod Frye slapped together a game in something like six or eight weeks to claim a $1,000,000 check from Atari. He apparently had never played the original arcade game before then. I don't doubt that story. We're talking about Atari in the early '80s here. One of the managers told the guys who eventually left to form Activision that he could crap into a box and sell 50,000 units. Atari didn't care about quality, they just wanted to pump out garbage to make a quick profit.

One problem with SD cards and other memory cards is rampant piracy. Custom versions of DVD technology seems like a better solution, like the GameCube's little sized disks.

I've always found that 2600 game colors seem a bit muted on the 7800. The colors in Adventure are really vibrant, and they seem really toned down through the 7800's circuitry. I've read before why that is, but I can't recall exactly why off the top of my head.

That's what I was going to say. Nintendo made toys and a couple of Pong consoles, and the company wasn't in a position to develop games for the US market for consoles that had only a tiny presence in Japan. Developing games would cost them money, but licensing out their games would earn them money.

Lucky Boys Confusion has a song called 'Atari'. "I don't want to stand here and say i'm sorry, I just want to drink beer and play Atari" http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore...43441&i=3476771

I was wondering if it had anything to do with all the 'cease and desist' letters Infogrammes/Atari was throwing around last year.

I'd like to know why this title got dropped too. It always bums me out when a game of this quality gets shelved.

I've seen copies of Xenophobe at classic game conventions sell for $5 brand new. I can't imagine they'd be all that rare.

Your 7800 came with Pro-Line joysticks? I thought the European versions of the 7800 came with those nice looking gamepads. By the way, great haul you've got there!

I get the feeling he's not a real game collector, since he refers several times to the cartridges as being 'tapes'. Anyway, we don't know this guy's financial situation. I hate people who snap up classic gaming stuff in the wild just to resell it, but maybe his car's about to go out, or he's desperate for money for some reason. And if he is a game collector but isn't into Nintendo stuff, he's at least not holding on to a bunch of super-rare stuff that he won't enjoy. Other people can have fun with the stuff he doesn't want.

It would be a toss-up between Dragonstomper and Secret Quest. Both are difficult to master, and would have the kind of depth needed to keep interested in them for a really long time.

Sears Telegames Heavy Sixer, #90875U. The channel select is deeply recessed, the sticker says it was made in Sunnyvale, and there's a tiny silver sticker on it that says "Sears Reconditioned", along with the numbers 7-4 etched in by hand.

Man, they must have not had a lot of stuff at the DAV when you went. The last time I went there, I found an Atari 7800, a 5200, a UMAX C500 Mac clone (like a lower speed version of the one I used to use), a Genesis with the Sega CD attached, and a bunch of Atari 2600 commons, and a few NES, Genesis, 32X, SNES, and SMS games behind the counter. I sometimes go to that Irving Thrift. For some reason, I seen to stumble across Saturn games there. I've found only a few things of interest in that store, so I virtually never hit it. Although in all the baggies of stuffed animals that sit on top of the clothing racks, I found a few bags of Colecovision carts and TI Home Computer carts. But these are definitely not my usual finds there. I only find something of interest maybe one out of eight trips. Mainly, when in Irving, I hit the DAV. Love that place. AKON was last week? I didn't know that. I went to one a year or two ago, it was pretty fun. I bought a couple DVDs there, then went to a Best Buy the next day and found the same DVDs a lot cheaper than what I paid for them. That kind of sucked. Well, Bruce, since you've hit the Thrift Town that I was planning on hitting Tuesday, I'm going to have to find some more stores to go to! I might go to the same area I did the last time you worked all my favorite thrifts, i'll go up to Haltom City. Hope I find more than I did last time.

The Dreamcast had two or three fishing games come out for it, didn't it?

Dude, i'm totally jealous! I haven't been able to get MacMAME working properly, so I haven't tried any of these games in emulation. I'd love to have real working copies of those.

I love the Customers Suck web site, but I can't read it too long. I work with a bunch of customers like that every day, and reading about them when i'm off work is a little too much for me. I try as hard as I can to forget them when i'm off work.

It would have been hilarious if this idiot had stolen all those games, gotten home, and opened them up to find that they were all empty display cases!

If they know that the car was a rental car, can't the cops track down who rented it? I hope to God they catch this moron. I'd love to see this guy going to prison and getting gangraped in the showers just for something as stupid as swiping PSP games and movies from a rental store. I hope he thinks of his PSP whenever his cellmate says "I'm gonna make you squeel like a pig, boy!"

Just put the cartridge into the slot, and then whack it with a mallet until it fits! It's like an Atari version of Whack-A-Mole!

The Amiga 600 isn't AGA? I could have sworn it was. I know that it was really tiny. I've always thought it was a cheaper, more compact version of the 1200. I was still getting a lot of use out of my good old 1000 anyway, I wasn't thinking of upgrading when the 600 came out.

I think he means this photo, from Goodwill's auction site. It looks like a nice amount of games in there. Some other games on Goodwill's site are mixed consoles, but state that they're Atari games. Seems to be a common occurance on auction sites.

I'm just amazed that vendors took PayPal, but not credit cards. That seems really odd to me. You'd think that they would both be equally difficult to set up at an expo, so why not do them both?